Business Growth Through Improved Product Development
A Systems Approach
Many hope for that one change that will bring success. Experience has shown that there is a system at work in Product Development. Why is a product development system difficult to change?
♦ There is typically a lot of complexity in the interaction of the people, the work content and the processes over time.
♦ Typical solutions address the symptoms since they focus on making sure particular events don't recur. While these changes may eliminate symptoms, underlying issues tend to surface in some other way.
♦ In a product development system, cause and effect are often not close in time and space so high leverage changes are not obvious to the players.
♦ Most challenging problems cross functional boundaries so solutions cannot be parochial ones based on the organizational structure where there is little leverage to be had from looking at each piece.
A systems view is what's needed.
This is the discipline for seeing "wholes", interrelationships, and processes of change rather than pieces, linear cause/effect chains and snapshots. Systems are not defined by the sum of their parts, they are defined by the interactions of their parts. The approach of who, what, and how covers all of the parts and aids in the discipline of understanding the interactions.
